“Congressional members of color — for the most part — recognize the importance of environmental protections for their constituents and communities,” the report reads.

LCV evaluated policymakers on 55 votes, including legislation on protecting drinking water and programs to address lead contamination.

Members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus averaged a 98 percent score on the LCV’s scale, while the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus averaged 90 percent and 89 percent, respectively. But those groups are almost entirely made up of Democrats. The Congressional Hispanic Conference, made up of 13 GOP pols of Latin heritage, averaged 10 percent — with Grist 50er Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida being the lone member over 50 percent.

The report specifically praises the work of Arizona Democrat Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who submitted three pro-environment amendments to Congress in 2016. One of those sought increased protections for farmworkers from pesticide exposure — an issue that made news this month when several laborers in California were poisoned when wind blew the neurotoxin chlorpyrifos into a field where they were working. It didn’t pass.

A new lawsuit argues that a river should have a person’s rights.

The federal lawsuit, filed this week by the environmental group Deep Green Resistance, seeks to protect the Colorado River — a water source for Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, and Las Vegas, among other desert-strewn metro areas.

The New York Times reports that the state of Colorado has been sued for failing to protect the river and its “right to flourish” by allowing pollution and general degradation. The plaintiff’s attorney — the plaintiff being the Colorado River — is Jason Flores-Williams, who told the New York Times that there is a fundamental disparity in rights of “entities that are using nature and nature itself.”

Those entities are primarily corporations, which have been granted human rights in major Supreme Court decisions over the past year. In the Citizens United and Hobby Lobby decisions, for example, the Supreme Court found that corporations should be afforded the human right to donate without limit to political campaigns and to refuse to comply with federal law on basis of religious freedom.

The main challenge for the river case is that a corporation is, by definition, a group of people — but hey, it’s worth a shot! Here’s a short video we made on why protecting waterways like the Colorado River is important, even for city-dwellers:

A volcano in Bali could erupt at any minute. More than 75,000 people have evacuated.

People are seeking refuge in camps, village halls, and relatives’ homes after fleeing the area around Mount Agung in Indonesia.

Mount Agung experienced hundreds of volcanic earthquakes on Monday and Tuesday, an indication that magma is moving toward the surface and an eruption may be coming. Local officials warn it could be just a “matter of hours.”

“Instrumentally we have never recorded such high energy or seismicity from Mount Agung,” Devy Kamil Syahbana, an Indonesian seismologist, told the Guardian. Authorities urged people to move out of the danger zone, an area within a seven-mile radius of the crater.

When the volcano last erupted in 1963, more than 1,000 people were killed. The explosion sent ash 12 miles high and spewed sulphur dioxide, which reacted with water vapor in the atmosphere to form droplets of sulphuric acid. The resulting haze in Earth’s stratosphere cooled global atmospheric temperatures by 0.1–0.4 degrees C.

There’s no telling exactly when Agung will go off again, but an eruption could have a similar, temporary effect on the atmosphere.

Hurricanes have made Caribbeans the world’s latest climate refugees.

And officials from the islands haven’t held back in reminding the industrialized world who’s at fault here. (Hint: not island people.)

Over the weekend, Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit was unapologetic as he spoke to the United Nations General Assembly. Hurricane Maria lashed his island before going on to destroy Puerto Rico. The Category 5 storm killed at least 15 residents of Dominica last week.

“While the big countries talk, the small island nations suffer,” said Skerrit. “We need action, and we need it now.”

It’s no secret that the developing world, especially island nations, will bear the brunt of climate change impacts — even though these places have contributed the least to global warming. And Caribbean leaders used their platform in New York City this past weekend to hammer this point home.

The country of Antigua and Barbuda is struggling to rebuild following landfalls by Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Prime Minister Gaston Browne eventually made his way to the U.N. with sobering news: “For the first time in 300 years, there is no permanent resident of Barbuda.”

News shows ignore the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico.

Millions of American citizens are without power, shelter, or clean water after Hurricane Maria devastated the U.S. territory last week. Yet, if you watched the news on Sunday, you would have heard hardly anything about it.

Five major political talk shows on Sunday spent less than a minute total covering the urgent crisis, according to a new report from Media Matters. Shows on ABC, CBS, and Fox all failed to touch on the situation. CNN and NBC mentioned Puerto Rico in passing, asking President Trump and viewers to help.

Why does Ryan Zinke keep saying fracking is a sign of “God’s sense of humor?”

Interior Secretary Zinke loves domestic energy production, but not as much as he loves repeating weird, jokey assertions about domestic energy production. For example, he keeps trotting out the same line about fracking, a natural gas extraction process that he’s pushed to reinstate on public lands.

In a speech at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, California, on April 15: “God’s got a sense of humor. He gave us fracking. And all of a sudden, we have more energy than anybody. But we’re going to use it right.”

Hurricane Maria has crushed Puerto Rican farmers.

The devastation wiped out 80 percent of Puerto Rico’s agricultural production, according to Puerto Rico’s agriculture secretary, Carlos Flores Ortega. The New York Times visited farmer José A. Rivera after the winds flattened his plantain, yam, and pepper fields.

“There will be no food in Puerto Rico,” Rivera, told the Times. “There is no more agriculture in Puerto Rico. And there won’t be any for a year or longer.”

Food prices will surely rise on the island, although the loss of crops will not necessarily mean people will starve. Puerto Rico imports about 85 percent of its food. Even so, the storm damaged the infrastructure used to distribute imported food, like ports, roads, and stores.